Not-God (46 page)

The sequence of Steps—Traditions—Concepts that guided A.A.’s history also shapes its story, for it parallels the unfolding of the fellowship’s three legacies of Recovery—Unity—Service. Especially the ever-increasing number of members who worked in service saw the relationship among Steps-Traditions-Concepts as paralleling the relationship that existed among the Steps themselves. Trying to work them separately, although perhaps a necessary beginning, in the long run just did not work. No more than one could make amends without taking personal inventory could one labor effectively in service if not working one’s program. Conversely, just as each Step seemed to pull its practitioner into the Step following, so did the practice of the Steps and guidance by the Traditions lead one to the Concepts of Service. “Service is gratitude in action,” runs one reminder. As Bill W. realized at the very beginning, and as the telephone calls that led to his first meeting with Dr. Bob S. attested, the Twelfth Step — carrying the message — was both guardian and springboard: guardian of individual sobriety and springboard to the A.A. way of life.

Bill designed the Twelve Concepts to guide change. Two continuing changes in the larger culture, Wilson foresaw, would especially require ongoing development within Alcoholics Anonymous: growth and communication. Someone who had lived through the advents of radio and television recognized that means and styles of communication rarely remain fixed. And the co-founder who had witnessed A.A.’s growth from two individuals to 8211 groups composed of 151,606 individuals (in 1959) surely suspected that A.A.’s growth would continue and that its expansion would involve as great changes as had the fellowship’s earlier flowering.
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The first General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous to meet without the presence of Bill W. assembled in April of 1971. Sessions were held at the Hotel New Yorker for the last time, the delegates in 1972 returning to the Hotel Roosevelt, where they have since remained except for a 1977 visit to the Statler-Hilton.
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The theme of the Twenty-first General Service Conference — “Communication: Key to A.A. Growth” — aptly summarized the two threads that would bind the unity of the next fifteen years of A.A.’s history. Through these years, A.A. grew, and both opportunities and problems attended that increase. Changes occurring in larger culture as well as the fellowship’s own growth combined to require innovations in how A.A. communicated its message not only to its own members and to “alcoholics who still suffer” but to the ever-increasing number of professionals who offered service to both.

Delegates began the 1971 General Service Conference by marking the death not only of Bill W., but of long-time A.A. trustee Bernard B. Smith.
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For the fellowship to lose two such leaders in less than seven months seemed gratuitously cruel. Yet after honoring the memories of Wilson and Smith, the delegates did not linger in their grief but turned smartly to present concerns. Three large topics framed the agenda not only of this twenty-first Conference but of the next decade and a half of A.A.’s history: communication with active alcoholics, relationship with professionals, and the composition of A.A. groups.

The delegates’ first chore was to explore ways of carrying A.A.’s message to still-suffering alcoholics. A recent survey revealed that over 50 percent of the general American public regarded A.A. members as “weak,” “unhappy,” and “neurotic.”
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Such attitudes challenged not only A.A.’s future growth but also its present spirituality.

A second concern involved A.A.’s ongoing relationship with professionals. This was hardly a new topic: in reviewing the Conferences’ history in 1977, General Service Board chairman Dr. John L. Norris recalled “much concern about ‘outside agencies’” as a 1959 theme.
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Concern had in fact dawned as early as 1946, with the flap over funding for the nascent National Conference for Education on Alcoholism.
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But the 1971 Conference addressed with a new urgency the sub-theme borrowed from Bill’s series of
Grapevine
articles “Let’s Be Friendly With Our Friends.” As the delegates at the Conference learned from a report on the federal Alcoholic Counseling and Recovery Program Act, government attention to alcoholism and the provision of federal money for its treatment would irrevocably change the world in which Alcoholics Anonymous operated.
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True to its Tradition of avoiding “outside controversy,” Alcoholics Anonymous had no opinion on funds or programs, federal or otherwise. But also within that Tradition, a two-sided concern emerged.

First, how would the “outside professionals,” whose number was sure to burgeon, relate to Alcoholics Anonymous? Would they reject its non-professional approach? Or would they expect too much of the fellowship and its program? By 1974, a substantive solution began to be devised, but its elements had not yet emerged in 1971. Second came the concern about A.A. members who themselves became professionals in what would rapidly become the “alcoholism treatment industry.” Outside professionals who recognized Alcoholics Anonymous as essential to recovery wisely sought to involve in their treatment programs those they initially termed “A.A. counselors.”
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A chief responsibility of these counselors was to help those treated to understand the nature of recovery and the place of Alcoholics Anonymous in it. But was this not “selling the Twelfth Step"? Did such terms as “A.A. counselor” and even “two-hatter” cohere well with the fellowship’s Traditions? These concerns, too, would be worked out over the next decade, but the delegates who for the first time were conscious of standing in the place of A.A.’s revered co-founder could not yet glimpse their ultimate solution.

A related consideration connected the concern about professionals with the desire to reach still-suffering alcoholics. Trustee John R. reminded of Bill W.’s insistence that Alcoholics Anonymous had “No Monopoly on Recovery.”
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Some of the fellowship’s more enthusiastic adherents were reputed to claim that theirs was the “one and only” way. Henceforth, in the new world sure to follow government attention, the delegates realized, such an attitude, carelessly expressed, could betray the fellowship’s purpose. The highest concept of professionalism suggested that true professionals were intolerant of only one thing: intolerance. But if they did not attend A.A. meetings, professionals would have no way of knowing A.A.’s pluralism, the wide variety of recoveries detailed in the stories told at meetings, or A.A. spirituality, “the spirituality of not having all the answers.’”
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Its very nature saddled Alcoholics Anonymous with a problem rarely directly confronted. A.A.’s Steps and Traditions combine with the fellowship’s practice of anonymity to issue in an ironic reality: those who best practice them speak least dogmatically about them. The anonymity tradition attempted to forestall the difficulty, but those most loudly public about their A.A. opinions were by that very fact least qualified to speak for Alcoholics Anonymous. Communicating this truth would remain a prime task as A.A.’s story continued to unfold.

The Twenty-first General Service Conference’s final concern involved changes in group composition. A.A.’s second survey was to be taken that year, and in affirming the need for such data, delegates addressed a perceived “generation gap” and lamented an increasingly noticeable trend for groups and meetings that had begun in inner-city areas to leave their neighborhood of origin.
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Both tendencies boded ill for the fellowship’s future. Similar afflictions had in the 1960s grievously wounded much of mainstream American religion. Emerging youth and slum subcultures threatened pluralism by denying unity. Were events outrunning the fellowship’s ability to adapt? Would A.A. have to change its program in order to adapt?

Discussion convinced participants that there existed no generation gap in Alcoholics Anonymous, that at least so far as A.A. was concerned, the phrase represented a slogan rather than a reality.
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In the terms in which the problem had been formulated, this perception was accurate. But the cliché “generation gap” served to obscure what would soon emerge as the real problem/opportunity: the increasing numbers of individuals who approached Alcoholics Anonymous bringing a problem not with alcohol but with other mood-altering chemicals. This soon proved a topic that would have its own story over the succeeding decade and a half.

The concern about groups and meetings leaving slum areas bore witness to the realities of the fellowship’s social composition. Although relatively few members came from skid row, those who did thus originate soon — and happily — escaped that background. Returning for meetings could afford a beneficial “Remember When.” But again ironically, as more and more slum dwellers turned to more and more potent drugs, such returning became increasingly unsafe. A.A.’s inner-city exodus was not unlike that of the churches. Members left with at least a twinge of guilt and frustration, with the sense that their inability to remain and flourish implied a kind of judgment on themselves. Here, A.A.’s single-minded focus on alcoholism helped. At times, settings that hosted meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous became the new home of groups of Narcotics Anonymous.
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Although only implicit at the 1971 Conference, the conjunction of the concerns to carry the A.A. message to alcoholics who still suffered and to serve areas being abandoned revealed the dawn of what would become one growing preoccupation over the following decade and a half — the difficulties that inhered in reaching various kinds of minorities. At the fellowship’s earliest dawn in both New York and Cleveland, concern about Catholics shaped its presentation of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. The mid-fifties had witnessed tribulations over
de facto
segregation by color. Sensitivity to those factors that inhibited women’s A.A. participation hallmarked the 1960s. As the seventies unfolded, changes in cultural reality and attitudes suggested the need to find ways of carrying the message to two new minorities — the increasingly numerous Hispanic alcoholics and the increasingly visible handicapped ones, especially those burdened by hidden deficiency in literacy.
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As late as 1975, efforts to make available Spanish-language literature sprang more from concern to carry the message into the countries of Latin America than from awareness of a need to serve the increasing numbers of Hispanic Americans migrating into the United States. Old biases shaped the earliest stages of that effort. Legends of Hispanic
macho
attitudes suggested to some the necessity of downplaying the concept of surrender. Others emphasized the need to recruit male members first, lest sobriety seem to be only for the weak. Reality — both the exigencies of producing the Spanish-language literature and the continuing sharing of “experience, strength and hope” by Spanish-speaking members — soon rectified the biases. As with all other earlier groups at first perceived as somehow “different,” Spanish-speaking alcoholics soon came to be accepted as
first
alcoholic.
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The transition was not so easily achieved for a less traditional minority. Although the first comic-book style publication, “What Happened to Joe,” was conceived in 1966 and produced in 1967, calls for further ways of reaching non-readers continued at virtually every General Service Conference meeting. By the late seventies, cassette tapes of A.A. literature originally intended for the blind began being aimed also at those who could not read. Yet an early 1987 report that the prison population of one southern state was “24 percent illiterate” suggested to the General Service Office staff the need to do still more. Partially because so many of them experience their inability as something shameful, the illiterate form an undervocal minority in an increasingly raucous context. Although Alcoholics Anonymous is to some extent a program “of the book,” its practice of story-telling, reliance on identification, and existence through meetings and groups well situate the fellowship to reach those handicapped in literacy. Impressions suggest that this began occurring more frequently in the late 1980s, with results yet to be determined.
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From an A.A. point of view, the 1970s in some ways resembled the 1940s: during both decades, the fellowship’s task was to establish an independent identity after losing connection with a shaping force. In the forties. Alcoholics Anonymous had voluntarily left the formative womb of the Oxford Group; now, in the seventies, its midwife had departed.
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Just as, in the 1940s, members discarded such remnants of their Oxford Group connection as “the five C’s,” so now in the early seventies, enduring affection for their co-founder did not inhibit G.S.C. delegates from shedding aspects of Bill Wilson’s continuing presence.
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The standard of “principles before personalities” implied that shrines were inappropriate, an interpretation supported by both co-founders’ much earlier decision concerning their final resting places. Thus it was that the 1972 General Service Conference followed previous practice and declined to accept the gift of Bill W.’s Bedford Hills home, Stepping Stones. The same Conference had, “after discussion,” “voiced the unanimous opinion that A.A. groups should not be named after an A.A. member or non-alcoholic, living or deceased.”
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On a related matter, the 1972 General Service Conference temporized. By April when the Conference met, A.A. members had contributed some $36,000 to the “Bill W. Memorial Fund” that demand had seemed to require establishing fourteen months earlier. Delegates deferred decision on a motion to transfer the money to A.A.’s General Fund. In 1973, the transfer of $39,755 was accepted and completed.
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Except for the topics of Stepping Stones and the Memorial Fund, the 1972 and 1973 General Service Conference reports were surprisingly silent about Bill W. Save for trustee Ralph A.’s reference to Wilson’s 1950 observation that the General Service Conference assured “that Alcoholics Anonymous was at last safe —
even from me!”
no speakers directly quoted A.A.’s longer-lived co-founder and the author of all of the fellowship’s literature.
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It was almost as if the delegates needed to demonstrate to themselves that they could take Bill’s place. Finally, that confidence having been successfully achieved over the intervening two years, the 1974 Conference heard a taped reproduction of Bill’s 1955 St. Louis talk — the presentation in which he had most clearly summarized his hopes that A.A.’s General Service Conference would serve as its co-founders’ successor. Bill’s recorded address immediately followed the Conference’s keynote, an appropriate placement that seemed to hint that sufficient autonomy had been achieved for it now to be safe to acknowledge his necessarily continuing influence.
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